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La Dolce Video

Kims was cutting-edge; that was always the business concept, said Yongman Kim, whose collection of more than 50,000 films is en route to Salemi in Sicily.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

IN 1987, when a broad-shouldered Korean immigrant named Yongman Kim opened a movie rental store on St. Marks Place in the East Village, he began with 8,000 films, from the odd to the adored.

Mr. Kim originally started renting films from the corner of his dry-cleaning business on Avenue A. But the St. Marks store, which would eventually occupy an entire scruffy building in the middle of the block, quickly became a local institution.

The eccentric selections intimidated some patrons. But many others, enthralled, frequently used the word “adventurous” to describe their forays through the shelves.

It was an adventure that extended to the assembly of the collection. Over the years, Mr. Kim, now in his late 40s, built a staff that traveled the world scouring for additional titles — the only way to find obscure films in the pre-Internet age. By 2008, the collection had swelled to 55,000 eclectic works, many impossible to find anywhere else.

The Internet had spawned Netflix, the elimination of late fees and no-effort rentals. The Internet also distracted consumers, stealing hours they might once have spent reveling in movies. In other words, the Internet was a force more powerful than the “Blood Sword of the 99th Virgin,” one of the more esoteric works in the Kim’s Video collection.

At the store’s peak in the 1990s, more than 200,000 people were listed in Kim’s database, but by the end of last year, only about 1,500 of them were considered active members. Though customers still harbored an obsessive affinity for Kim’s cult collection, along with its cantankerous employees and underground spirit, for too many of them, that affection had faded into a fond memory.

“Kim’s was the cutting-edge; that was always the business concept,” Mr. Kim said the other day in one of a series of conversations about the fate of his video collection. “But ironically, I didn’t prepare.”

Last September, in a move that swept through the Internet at viral speed, he issued a public challenge. In a notice pasted on a wall inside the front door, he wrote, “We hope to find a sponsor who can make this collection available to those who have loved Kim’s over the past two decades.” He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others.

Offers poured in. Every one failed on one count or another. Every offer, that is, except one.

The ‘Alderman to Nothing’

The month that Mr. Kim posted his notice, a 42-year-old Italian graphic designer named Franca Pauli found herself intrigued by an article in La Repubblica, one of Italy’s national newspapers.

According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi had initiated an unusual renewal project. Founded around the fourth century B.C., the town achieved brief renown as the site where Giuseppe Garibaldi first planted the country’s tricolored flag in 1860 during his quest for a unified Italy.

But Salemi’s moment of glory lasted only a day before the place slipped into oblivion. A devastating earthquake in 1968 proved the final blow, and for decades, the historic center sat abandoned, the town largely forgotten.

The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. A prince was put in charge of town planning, and a performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose ad campaigns for Benetton included a series on AIDS patients and inmates on death row, was named alderman of creativity.

Ms. Pauli had worked with Mr. Toscani years earlier. Now, as president of a small arts foundation called Clio, an organization devoted, as she put it, to promoting “culture as an everyday thing, something you consume every day,” she was fascinated by this effort to give artists political power.

Two months later, on Nov. 23, she and her husband, Dario Colombo, a photographer and a partner in the foundation, packed up their four children and traveled to Salemi from their home near Venice for a quick, investigatory vacation.

Their first afternoon, they drove up a steep spiraling road, parked their car and trudged up slender, twisting stone streets built for feet and donkey-drawn carts. The surrounding buildings, a blend of Greek, Roman, Norman and Arabic architecture spanning centuries, were stunning, although a closer look revealed cracks in the pale yellow stone.

In a cafe near a piazza, a chatty bartender informed Ms. Pauli that she had picked a fortunate time to visit: Mayor Sgarbi’s renewal program, Progetto Terremoto — Project Earthquake — was beginning that very day. Just then, a voice from a loudspeaker summoned visitors and residents to the castle for the opening ceremony.

Photo

Glen Hyman, top; and Franca Pauli, bottom, with her husband, Dario Colombo are helping to shape the plan by which the collection of Kims Video in the East Village will find a new home in Sicily.Credit
Top, Benjamin Sutherland; bottom Fondazione Clio

Ms. Pauli streamed with the crowd to hear officials call for ideas to enhance Salemi’s artistic and cultural stature. Already, the town was offering to sell houses in the historic center for a single euro in exchange for commitments to restore the buildings within two years. And after a dizzying three days of questions, conversations and exchanged business cards, Ms. Pauli returned home determined to suggest a project of her own.

A Dream Born Near Venice

Within days of her return, an itinerant graduate sociology student named Glen Hyman arrived in Italy. One of the items on his schedule was dinner with Ms. Pauli, whom he had met through mutual friends.

Mr. Hyman, 31, had taught bread-making in China, sailing in Sweden and English in French villages. A doctoral student in Paris who lived largely on friends’ couches, he was also a fan of Kim’s Video, which he had first encountered some years earlier through a friend at New York University’s film school.

“It was like film heaven, in a way,” Mr. Hyman said recently by phone from Brazil, where he was doing field work. “You couldn’t make it up.”

When he learned of Mr. Kim’s plan to close the store and offer up the collection, Mr. Hyman quickly shared the news with his N.Y.U. friend, now a filmmaker.

Mr. Hyman was stunned by his friend’s reaction, which ricocheted between anger (“Kim’s should have done more delivering and stopped with the late fees!”) and self-blame (“I killed Kim’s — I signed up for Netflix”).

Mr. Hyman, too, was saddened. But he filed the story away as another sad, curious loss not uncommon in a city like New York.

“I was trying to imagine who on earth would have space enough to take the thing,” he said. “I thought it was a rather beautiful gesture to give this collection away, benevolent and philanthropic. But at the same time, I didn’t give much thought to it.”

That evening in late November, over a dinner of stew, homemade bread and fresh polenta, Ms. Pauli shared the story of Salemi with her young visitor, and he in turn talked about what was happening at Kim’s. As he described the video store’s collection and Mr. Kim’s offer, Ms. Pauli listened in amazement.

“My first thought was like, ‘Wow, I might propose that to Salemi,’ ” Ms. Pauli said. “But really, it was almost like a joke. I really didn’t expect this to come true.”

Nevertheless, unable to shake the idea, she e-mailed Mr. Kim, eager to gauge whether he would even consider an offer from Italy.

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He would, he told her, but only if the offer were serious. She started making phone calls.

“It was almost like falling in love with this thing, and I was trying not to,” Ms. Pauli said. “You’re thinking, ‘I’m sure someone from New York will take the collection,’ so I was trying to be really cautious. But I also thought, maybe this community that’s coming about in Salemi could be the right place after all to understand this, this amazing collection.”

As details about the possible arrangement leaked out, some Kim’s customers took the news as a second, more serious blow. Some of them even confronted Mr. Kim in the store and by phone, challenging him to find a way to keep the movies in the community, or at least on the continent.

And he says he tried.

“Until the last minute,” Mr. Kim said, “I was still waiting for some decent offer. It was very disappointing.”

According to his account, 30 proposals were submitted from throughout the metropolitan region, but for one reason or another, all fell short. And slowly he was won over by the enthusiasm of Ms. Pauli and the new team in charge in Salemi.

“When I saw that we could have this collection,” said Mr. Toscani, director of the town’s Department of Creativity, “I thought it would be a great adventure, a great project.” New Yorkers, he added, “shouldn’t be upset because the movies are going to be in an incredible place; and on top of seeing Kim’s movies, they can see the landscape around Salemi that is something very special, much better than New York.”

“Salemi is the future,” Mr. Toscani concluded. “New York is the past. That’s why Kim’s is coming here.”

Plans under way include what is described as a Never-ending Festival — a 24-hour projection of up to 10 films at once for the foreseeable future. The town also plans a relationship with the Venice Biennale, a collaboration with the University of Palermo and a professional translation company to subtitle the films, a Web site with a searchable database and, eventually, the conversion of all Kim’s VHS films to DVDs to ensure their preservation.

Photo

The collection of Kims Video in the East Village will find a new home in the Sicilian town of Salemi, left, there to be housed in a former Jesuit college, right, in the towns historic center.Credit
Left, Department of Creativity, Salemi

Projection spaces and lodging for visitors will be created within a restored 17th-century Jesuit college, which will house the collection. The building, which now serves as the town’s municipal museum, has a large inner courtyard perfect for public projections.

Still to be worked out is how much all this will cost — the unofficial figure for what has happened so far is 80,000 euros, the equivalent of upward of $100,000, though donated services may have made the actual cost much less — and where the money will come from. Because everything happened so fast — within two months — only now are budgets being prepared and sponsorships sought.

“We all generally start projects from an idea, but then we have to calculate a budget and planning and timing and meetings,” Ms. Pauli said, laughing. “This was the opposite. It was all friends and phone calls and meeting people in a bar.”

The team is working on special provisions for Kim’s members who venture to Salemi, including free access to films and discounted places to stay. The team is also exploring the possibility of letting Kim’s members continue to “rent” films, either through mail order or, yes, Internet streaming.

‘The End of an Era’

On Jan. 17, Kim’s was packed with customers picking through the final sales of records and VHS tapes, CDs and obscure DVDs.

The aisles were packed with young film students and aging hipsters, pale men clad in black and trendy women wearing stylish caps. Price tags were stuck on every item, even down to the electronic security gate at the entrance.

Eric Hopper, a 38-year-old teacher and filmmaker at the New School who lives near Union Square, surveyed the scene sadly.

“I was really surprised in a city like this that no one found the room,” said Mr. Hopper, who grew up in the Midwest reading about films he could never find.

He first encountered the store in the mid-1990s, while passing through the city as a musician on tour. When he settled in New York in 2005, visiting Kim’s was one of the first things he did.

“I don’t even know where I’m going to rent stuff now,” he said. “It’s the end of an era.”

Today, Mr. Kim’s entire collection is in containers and on its way to Italy, carefully packed to preserve his unique filing system, and scheduled to arrive in Palermo by Feb. 26. When the collection reaches Salemi a few days later, what Ms. Pauli described as a “human chain” of people will unload the cardboard boxes, carry them through the town’s narrow streets and deposit the videos in their new home.

Everyone involved realizes that duplicating in the Old World what existed in the New will be impossible.

“It’s not the East Village,” Ms. Pauli said. “We can’t try to make a replica of that. But it’s a new door we can open. And we would like to involve Kim’s Video members and all the community of film lovers in New York, and in America, and anywhere.”

Mr. Kim, for his part, still gets daily calls from irate customers.

“I was very shocked,” he said last week, sitting in a bar near his new retail store on lower First Avenue. “If this number of people went to Kim’s Video, we would have stayed for a while. And we would be a very healthy operation. But once we’re down, now I’m getting a lot of support. It’s very ironic to me.”

He lamented the end of the business that he loved, a business that once allowed him to carve out his own contribution in America. And he mourns more than the loss of his movies.

“My passion was the introduction to my new community in U.S. of my film love,” he said. “This kind of passion is no longer welcome, due to the new technology of the Internet.”

He looked off into the distance. “The future of the video rental business is really dying and declining so fast, so fast,” he added. “I realized this thing so late.”

But he also knows that for his collection, bright days may lie ahead 3,000 miles away.

Of the group from Salemi, which he described as “very serious and sincere,” he said, “I don’t have any doubt that they will have a great program with my collection.”

And as for his former customers in the East Village, he added, “One day, I hope they understand.”